Various Artists – Pioniere des Jazz (Amiga) album art
Front cover.
A Lettera double feature for the cover of a jazz compilation released by (East) German Amiga Records in 1969. Christoph Ehbets (1935–1992) was an avid user of the alphabet source books by Swiss publisher Niggli. Forest House was one of his favorites and can be found in many of the covers by the designer from Berlin-Köpenick. The condensed slab serif with contour and shadow is part of a series of decorated capital alphabets drawn by Paul Sollberger, a graphic artist from Bern. For “JAZZ”, Ehbets switched to another, more festive design: Macdonald is an ornamented fat face that probably goes back to the 1820s or 1830s. The two shaded all-caps alphabets are both reproduced in the first volume of Lettera from 1954 and are here used with a color fill.
Detail.
Front cover of a different pressing with a more sober Amiga logo.
The back cover is set in two different geometric sans serifs: While the tracklist with credits is in Fundamental-Grotesk (1938), the liner notes by Werner Sellhorn are in Super-Grotesk (1930). Both were drawn by Arno Drescher and continued after the war by Typoart.
